General Electric wants Earth-worshippers to fall in love with it. It's going to dredge the Hudson River to scrape up poisonous chemicals it dumped there years ago. It's going to sell more windmills and energy-efficient diesel locomotives. Daniel Fisher reports on page 80.

Should you show your support by buying a few shares of this ecologically hip company? There are better ways to help the environment.

Oppose windmill subsidies. A spin of the blades saves a dollop of fossil fuel. That looks like a win for Mother Earth, until you step back and look at the big picture. Windmills guzzle land, labor and metal. The first of these is limited in supply and the other two consume precious resources, like crude oil, indirectly. Shouldn't a proper accounting include the electricity burned in the GE windmill factory and the gasoline bought by the windmill lobbyist? It's impossible to add up all the indirect environmental costs of a windmill, but a good proxy for this arithmetic is simply to compare the resources consumed (in dollars) with the output produced (in dollar value of the electricity). No question, consumption exceeds output, as you can tell from the fact that the windmill industry survives only by dint of a huge federal subsidy, 1.9 cents per kilowatt-hour of juice. Tell your senators to vote against the subsidy.

In a similar way Amtrak is an environmental disaster, consuming billions of dollars more than it produces.

Oppose the dredging. It's quite possible that more harm than good will be done by stirring up the muck under the Hudson. If there's a net gain, it's small. It would be far better to take the $460 million GE is going to spend on this project and use it to acquire endangered wetlands.

Buy hormonal milk. Cows treated with bovine somatotropin consume less pasture to produce a gallon of milk than cows fed organically. By supporting BST you are protecting the world's forests from being plowed under for farms. Peter Huber elaborates the argument in his Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists (Basic Books, 1999).

Don't recycle newspapers. From Georgia to Maine, forestland is under threat from vacation home developers. You can help spare it from the bulldozer by buying forest products. When you put your paper in the trash, you boost the demand for virgin pulp and thus help trees win out over driveways in the competition for acreage.

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